University of Houston

The complications attributed to CDV are the leading cause of death worldwide. It is known that one of the primary causes of CVD are due to coronary artery disease (CAD. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is a catheter-based medical image technique that is capable of providing cross-sectional images of the interior of blood vessels and it is currently the gold-standard technique for assessing the morphology of blood vessels and atherosclerotic plaques. While there has been a significant effort to automatically extract the valuable information provided by IVUS, it has not been until recent years that the research has started to focus in the analysis of the radio frequency (RF) ultrasound signal instead of the IVUS images, which are the result of several post-processing and transformations of the raw signal. However, the RF signal has not been yet exploited for the assessment of other characteristics of the vessel such as size of the lumen, and detection and quantification of extra-luminal blood perfusion. The overall goal of our research is to develop computational tools for the automatic assessment of the morphology of the vessel based on the analysis of the IVUS RF signal and the detection and quantification of extra-luminal blood perfusion.